LWC Community Celebrates Its Methodist Heritage at Church College Day

Love, who is superintendent of the Columbia District of
the Kentucky Annual
Conference of The United Methodist Church, has an office on the
Lindsey Wilson College A.P. White Campus. He said Wednesday, Oct.
23, at the college's annual Church College Celebration Day that he
has a front-row seat that allows him to observe what it means to be
a church-related college.

"It is a privilege to come on to this campus every day …
and to see at work on the campus of Lindsey Wilson College -- the
fulfilling of exactly these end goals: pursuit of a great higher
education and yet the instilling of a value-added benefit that will
make you and all of us better able to serve the world in which we
live," Love said at the service, held Wednesday afternoon in V.P.
Henry Auditorium.

An annual event, Church College Celebration Day was
started more than 20 years ago by then-LWC Provost and Dean of the
Faculty Walter S. Reuling as an expression of the
college's relationship with The United Methodist Church. LWC was founded
in 1903 by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South to prepare
students for Vanderbilt University. Today, the college is
affiliated with the Kentucky Annual Conference of The United
Methodist Church.

This year's Church College Celebration Day also included
an evening concert by the LWC Concert Choir and Lindsey Wilson
Singers, held at Columbia United Methodist Church.

At Wednesday afternoon's service, Love said "the
church-related college was the norm" in higher education's first
200 years in the United States.

"There is reason to rejoice in the fact that
church-related colleges such as Lindsey Wilson College still
exist," he said. "A church-related college has a value-added
benefit that cannot be found in every inst of higher education. The
end goal of a church-related college is the cultivation of persons
fully equipped to live at their best and make the greatest possible
contribution to the society which they are part."

LWC Dean of the Chapel Terry Swan noted in his message -- titled "God
Loveth Adverbs" -- the "remarkable transformation that Lindsey
Wilson has gone through" during his almost three decades of service
at the college.

Although many church-related colleges have loosened their
denominational ties, Swan said LWC's ties to The United Methodist
Church "instead have dramatically become more intentional by both
highlighting and cultivating our church relationship."

"There's something peculiar and special about the way we
express our faith here at Lindsey Wilson College," Swan said.
"There is a subtlety, there is a beauty, there is an unassuming
nature to our faith here. It is not presumptuous; our faith is not
highly prescriptive.

"We do not require our staff nor our students to sign a credo or
a faith statement. We welcome everyone to the table. But to all who
do sign on, all agree to be respectful and to be receptive to
faith, because that is our very mission here."

Watch
...Click here to watch the Church College
Celebration Day. (Click on the "On Demand" tab.)